List items
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The CoD that started my reentry into the franchise. Really tight shooting, but the maps are pretty damn boring which was one thing that drove me to Cold War. This game has a much better BR mode than it's sequel also.
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Probably the most fun of the three I played. Maps are the most interesting, shooting is fast paced and fun, and I had the least problems getting murdered by campers.
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The shooting feels the worst out of the three CoD's I got into. There's a fidelity to the animations and sound design that makes them feel and sound good, but the actual pull down the trigger and aiming, as well as movement, feels slow and unresponsive. This is a huge deal in Call of Duty especially and the main reason I've ended up being Cold War and Modern Warfare 1 much more. The progression was another thing I had issues with; it's just not fun to have to use a bunch of guns I don't give a shit about to use what I want to use.
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I bounced off of Yes Your Grace after a few hours. While the idea of having to make hard choices to manage your kindgom with real consequences does appeal to me, it became obvious early on that anything actually important the game would decide for me. That's fine, I get wanting to tell your story at the end of the day, but for me I was expecting a more personalized journey, so having the rug pulled out from under me a couple times just left a bad taste in my mouth.
By no means a bad game, but not exactly what I wanted unfortunately.
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6/10
I really like the premise of Road 96. Going on a cross country roadtrip where you're meeting interesting people and figuring out more about the state of the world and why your characters are fleeing in the first place. Unfortunately, the game fails to properly flesh out both things.
The characters are interesting when you meet them the first couple things in your first couple different lives, but at some point you know what to expect from all of them. Even worse, the best character (Zoey) ended up becoming unavailable somewhere around halfway through my time with the game and her absence made the game worse as a hole, which I guess is kind of a compliment in a way. The fact that you see the world through all these different people you play as traveling towards the border does offer a unique perspective of all the other characters journeys, but it does mean that you as the player have no character at all. Everyone is pretty quick to trust you, even though we're supposed to believe they're all mostly wary and on the run, so it does take away from the believability of the interactions you have with each of them as well.
The world itself is hard to invest in too. From what I put together, the country seems to be run by a tyrant people are on the run from. The game spends a lot of time telling you he's a bad dude, and you're forced to pick sides all the time throughout the game. It's only near the end of the game that you actually see some stuff that he's done that's bad though, the rest of the time the game just wants you to take its wod, which is really bizarre considering one of its core messages is you can't just blindly trust and conform, you have to rise up and fight for the truth. I would've liked to see a more nuanced grey vs grey kind of ideological battle if that's the kind of story it wanted to tell, but perhaps I'm foisting too high of a demand on what feels like a relatively small scale project.
For what it is, it's a sometimes fun and often goofy adventure game. It does bite off more than it can chew and I'd almost rather they cut out the amount of runs you can do to focus more on just a few different options they could flesh out.
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Let me get this out of the way: I would never dispute that this is one of the best jrpgs of all time and arguably one of the best games ever made. Although I personally have my issues with it, I'm not gonna argue that it shouldn't be at the top of either of those respective lists. Things like the art and the music have held up incredibly good over time. For me though, even though the dressings have held up great, I just couldn't find much fun in playing the game itself.
There were more than a few times I got lost and by the time you unlock several time periods to travel through, it can be a pain to figure out where you need to go next without wasting too much time traveling around. A lot of the entrances to specific time periods are tucked away and cumbersome to get to so it's really not fun when you don't know where to go. It's definitely a product of its time and I don't hold that against it, but for me, it often led to frustration akin to pixel hunting in adventure games rather then a fun sense of exploration.
When I wasn't getting frustrated exploring, I was getting bored by the battles. Besides the occasional boss fight that demanded more of the player, like a specific mechanic to do damage to that specific boss or something, I got through every fight by just mashing A on attack. I'd use aoe spells when I needed to, but that's about it. Especially in jrpgs which are filled full of random encounters, the last thing you want is a boring battle system. Maybe in the later half of the game it gets more complicated, but by the time I get a dozen or more hours into the game I was kinda hoping for more.
What I did see of the story was intriguing and I did want to see it through, especially to see what happens to the quirky, fun cast of characters you assemble through the game (Frog squad). At some point though I just couldn't get excited about booting up my SNES though. Maybe one day I'll go back and try it again, but until then I'll appreciate it from a distance.
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8/10
I remember saying after Breath of the Wild came out that I'd love for more Zelda games like this, but not necessarily one taking place in the same world, as I've already -been- in this world for 85+ hours and I didn't really have anything left to discover. After putting 155+ hours into the sequel that takes place in the same world, I'm happy to be wrong.
Although I did put a ton of time into Tears of the Kingdom, that didn't stop my previous concerns from manifesting. This Hyrule is inherently less interesting. You've met these people, you've discovered these places, you've collected a lot of the same exact things before. I can't imagine what it must feel like for completionists who finished the Compendium and found all the Korok Seeds to come to this game and see all that progress wiped out, only for Nintendo to ask you to do the exact same thing again, but more this time. That being said, sequels like this have some benefits too. It's awesome seeing how people have changed in the years since the first game, and seeing how the world has changed too. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, to be honest. I think being in this same world again allows them to better justify adding the Ultrahand ability too, because what you can do with that thing just completely subverts how Nintendo originally wanted people to traverse this world. Gone are the days of stamina rationing, or trying to angle your paraglider just right off the highest point you can find. In are the ways of strapping rockets to your shield and building flying machines to go everywhere. It inherently diminishes what made BotW's exploration so good, but in a world you've already -seen- (for the most part), why not fly in style? It's a fun as hell mechanic and it's one of the things that make this direct sequel work.
The abilities in general are much more fun than BotW, I'd say. I do miss the momentium building ability, but that's about it honestly. TotK's abilities are all basically just hacks that the developers intentially left on, and it makes the game incredibly goofy sometimes, but also really fun to mess around with. Although I did mess around with making vehicles a fair bunch, I rarely tried to make much else. The same goes for Fusing: I kept it pretty vanilla and played it mostly like a standard run up and slash dudes Zelda game. I've seen people combine some crazy shit though to interesting effect.
The story is another point of contention for me. I really liked the actual story beats, but they're told in a way that does a disservice to the story itself. TotK gives the player much more guidance than BotW does, quickly giving you waypoints to several main quests. Not long after that, you learn of geoglyphs and then it wasn't too long till the game told me exactly where to find all of them. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but when you tell me exactly where a bunch of story related cutscenes are, the first thing I want to do is seek them out and before I had even finished the second dungeon I had found them all. They very explicitly tell you what's going on with the main story and as a consequence for that, it undermines the dramatic moments you end up having with characters throughout the remainder. There were several instances of characters openly wondering what was going on, where the game was clearly trying to give me hints to understand the larger mystery. Meanwhile, I'm there having seen all the geoglyphs and knowing exactly what's going on. It makes the characters seem real dumb. To their credit, for some moments they even wrote dialogue acknowledging
-spoiler- you have the Master Sword already, but there are way many more times where the game is trying to be mysterious or trying to have a big reveal to no effect. I'm glad they made it easier than BotW to find the memories, but they made them waaaay more crucial in this game. When you add that to how copy pasted the sages reactions are to everything, it's kinda disappointing. Like I said before, I like the story itself, but it's told in a bad way. I suppose it's partially a consequence to how open the world is.
Thankfully, that world, despite everything else, is still fun as hell to explore. I put way more time into this game than BotW. I did every shrine, lit every lightroot, found every outfit from other Zelda games, and in general just spent a ton of time finding and doing anything that I thought would make Link stronger and seemed important. This world is less interesting than BotW, but it's still interesting as fuck. I played the shit out of this game. I have a very similar opinion coming out of this game overall as I did when I finished BotW. It's a cool ass open world Zelda game that's really fun to play and explore, but ultimately has some flaws that hold it back from being perfect. Same as before, if this is the formula from hear on out, I'm down with it. HOWEVER. They should make the dungeons more expansive, like the old games. They should put you in a different kind of Hyrule, Two is the limit for basically the same world,
That being said, who am I kidding. I would play the shit out of a third game in this world. I'm sure I'd have the same problems, but Nintendo has proven twice now that they stand above the rest of the industry in their ability to create fun as hell, open world rpgs where the exploration and abilities and story all feed into each other to make a kickass game.
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7/10
Probably the biggest blotch on my lifelong Zelda playing career is never beating Link to the Past. I'm happy to have finally rectified that and more than willing to admit that it's probably one of the best games ever made, and if not that, then at least one of the most important games ever made. HOWEVER. For me personally, it is not one of my favorite games, nor is it anywhere close to one of my favorite Zelda games.
That's not because I don't like it! The games got a lot going for it. The art is timeless, especially the sprites. There's some iconic tracks, like Kakariko Village, Lost Woods, and Hyrule Castle. This is the first game where you go pull out the friggin Master Sword! There's lots of great things about this game, but the game itself is not perfect. The difficulty is one of the biggest complaints I have. As soon as you enter the Dark World, the difficulty shifts dramatically. Everything does way more damage and there's not really much you can do about it until several dungeons in where you can upgrade your armor and sword. To be clear, I'd be down for a difficulty spike, it does make thematic sense, but the ways to mitigate that spike are hidden way too far down the line when most of the enemies are doing 1 - 3 hearts of damage.
Dealing with this influx of hard enemies is another problem I have. When they're weaker it's not as big of a deal if you get hit, but when they hit for a couple hearts, every hit matters and the game is limited by its control scheme. You can move in four directions and attack in four directions, but enemies can hurt you by just moving into you diagonally. You're forced to do a sort of run away and turn around quick bait and switch, but a lot of enemies move faster than you do. Or there's a bunch of them. Or there's a pit around you they'll bump you into. It makes for tense moments which I sometimes appreciated, but it's often overwhelming and feels incredibly hard to deal with.
I also was a little disappointed in the world itself. This version of Hyrule is pretty barebones. it has a lot of the same locales of later Zelda's, but there's really not much to them, artistically or content wise. For instance, if you compare Zora's Domain or Death Mountain in LttP to OoT, it's night and day. Not to mention that the only real civilization you interact with in LttP is just other Hylians. This lack of content compared to later Zelda's was really noticeable for me and it made the world seem much smaller and less interesting.
On the totally other end of the spectrum, I beat this game in two and a half, maybe 3 days. That's not me saying it was short, though it is compared to what the series has become. I just didn't wanna stop playing. It's still a damn good Zelda game at the end of the day, and that's my jam. I don't find it as fun or interesting as what came after, but I still enjoyed my time with it.
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6/10
I got a significant chunk of the way through this game years ago on the PS4, but never finished it. I couldn't remember why I dropped off, considering I put so much time into it and I remember liking it. Upon finally replaying it and finishing it, I now remember what caused me to drop it in the first place.
I never played Resident Evil back in the day, and the order in which I did experience them as a young adult is like a fucked up Star Wars watch order. It went: 5 6 4 7 2 Remake 3 Remake. I'm waaaay more used to a more action-y Resident Evil, where there's still inventory management and ink ribbions, but the game is much more forgiving and the control schemes are much more modern. I imagine the GC remake is a big improvement on the original in this regard, but compared to the post Resident Evil 4 games, it's a big difference and one I couldn't really appreciate. I wanted to kill every zombie I saw, I wanted to shoot them in the head for maximum effectiveness to conserve ammo, and this game isn't really that. Playing on the Easy difficult like I did helps, but the aiming still leaves a lot to be desired, there's sometimes issues where if you don't straight up miss, the game won't register a hit if they're in the middle of a falling down or getting up animation which can also be frustrating when ammo is limited. Maybe this is another intentional thing, like the camera angles purposely obfuscating views of enemies, or the tension created by the door opening animations, or the narrow hallways, that is designed to get more tension out of each encounter and encourage the player to time things better, or to use space better, but I found all of those things frustrating more than I did tension inducing.
I still enjoy exploring the mansion and I can really appreciate RE2 Remake more now for how obvious the police station is a follow up to the mansion design. It just becomes frustrating to explore the mansion when you've got door loading screens constantly and such limited item space that you're constantly running back to the item box. I do like that the scarcity of item boxes forces you to reenter the same areas over and over again, so it's easy to get surprised when you let down your guard, however, like I mentioned above, tons of loading screens and lack of inventory make this happen faaaaaaar too often for my liking.
I'm glad I finally closed the book on this first Resident Evil game and although I had problems with the gameplay and some design choices, there's still enough in the core loop of that game to spend an afternoon solving puzzles, finally using that item you've been holding onto for six hours, and shooting a bunch of zombies without realizing how late it's gotten.
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10/10
Man, what can I say, this is definitely my Game of the Year and definitely one of my favorite games ever made. I'm writing this in 2024, several months after I beat the game and the only thing that came close to topping Baldurs Gate was Tears of the Kingdom, and even that isn't close, at this point. I've beaten the game twice, watched someone else play a huge chunk of it, and I'm 3/4 the way through a Hard playthrough. I don't know the last time I've dived into a game that hard, maybe World of Warcraft, or Mass Effect 2 or something. It's even crazier to say that because it wasn't even on my radar. I had completely written it off as "not for me" until a week after it came out, when people were losing their minds at how good it was. I had to find out why people loved it so much, and luckily I loved it too.
It's all the writing and characters, for me. It's been since maybe Persona 4 that I've fallen so hard for a cast of characters. Some of them are more fleshed out than others, but man, the core cast is just incredible. The voice actors did such a great job voice them, and there's so much contextual dialogue (though much more in the first act then the latter two). i wish there was more banter between the characters, but what you do get is still good. And at the end of the day, you as the main character can connect with all of them. I did that thing I used to do in Mass Effect and KotOR where you do a loop to see, to hope, that someone has something to talk with you about. I do wish they stood on their own more as characters, in some instances. For as much as they are their own person, it can become incredibly easy to persuade them to completely flip their character. There is definitely an assumption you're probably gonna play this game like a good dude and most peoples arcs feel most natural when they're taken in that direction. There is evil sides to all of them and as far as indulging in that side and making it feel believable, they do a pretty good job. You can't have that kind of system without it taking a little bit out of the characters themselves, but especially if you're only gonna play this game once, I don't mind it at all.
Though if you do choose to play it more than once, there's a shit ton of variation. It's very easy to miss or lose party members, there's whole other pathways to explore that you can't if you choose one direction over the other your first time through, and there's so much variation in the combat and classes that you could totally end up playing it a completely different way your second time. The combat itself is surprisingly fun and dynamic and most definitely the best we've ever seen at adapting DnD combat. It allows for so much weird, dumb shit to happen and endlessly rewards creativity. After almost three full playthroughs, only then did I get kinda tired of it so that's saying something.
I still haven't seen whatever they added during the epilogue and I'm really damn curious. It's really amazing that they've continued to add stuff to the game, even months after its release. I'm not sure if they will ever release a full dlc pack for it, but if not, god I hope they do a sequel. The world has plenty of room for more stories and it was so critically well receieved and hopefully made so much money. Genuinely one of my favorite gaming experiences in years and I wish I could go back to playing it for the first time.
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9/10
I remember that I played RE4, but huge chunks of the game have been lost to my shitty memory. I didn't even remember there was an island section, for instance. Needless to say, I was not someone who went into this remake with any expectations, nor anything to hold against it if it didn't get it true to the original, so to speak. It doesn't seem to have mattered thankfully, as both people I know who love the original and "newcomers" like myself all loved it.
The same tight gameplay from RE2 Remake is found here once again and it's even better than its predecessor. You're still kickin' boxes and collectin treasures like you always have, and using those rewards to make your guns perform even better is a very satisfying loop. This works for me because the gunplay feels so satisfying; not just shooting dudes in the head (though that's a huge part of it), but in smaller details. Shooting them in the head and immediately following up with a melee attack, timing a parry just right, that terrifying moment you're dumping into some stupid villagers skull and you hear the click of an empty magazine, but then cool guy Leon flicks it away super cool like and reloads. Shooting dummies never felt so damn good. It's awesome that RE4 could come out again like 20 years later almost and still be one of the tightest third person shooters around.
They changed the way Ashley works in this game as well so she feels a little less like a hassle to have around. It's still an escort mission when she's around, and it definitely adds tension during combat when she gets picked up and you have to deal with that on top of a thousand other things, but it's definitely better than it was in the original. They obviously completely redid the graphics for the remake too and it looks fuckin great.
As for as remakes go, this might be one of the best if not the best one ever made. It keeps faithful to what matters from the original, but brings it into the modern Capcom RE fold. It looks and plays great and as soon as I finished it, I was very tempted to just jump right back in.
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6/10
When Bethesda announced Starfield I was excited to hear they were trying something new, but definitely tempered my expectations. I wasn't a huge fan of Fallout 4 and if that's the direction they were taking their games from now on then their games might not be as much for me as they are for others. Even though I went into Starfield with the bar pretty low, I still managed to have to lower my expectations quite a bit lower by what I experienced in the final product.
The elephant in the room with any Bethesda game at this point is how is the performance and how many glitches are there. Good news on the glitch front, Starfield is definitely the least glitchy Bethesda game at launch, although there were still times the camera didn't focus correctly on an NPC, or I got frozen in a menu, mostly minor stuff. There was one pretty bad glitch that made me have to reload a save around 20 - 30 minutes before to fix an issue, but that was the exception to the generally benign glitches I experienced. Performance wise however, it was anything but benign. From the getgo, I never got the game running great throughout the two weeks or so it took me to beat the game (about 68 hours total). Through mods that introduced performance tweaks or added DLSS support, (something Bethesda has promised in an upcoming patch, though I imagine much too late for most of the people playing the game when it came out to experience) I managed to get it to a playable framerate while also looking good enough, but it was never a steady 60 let alone anything beyond that. On top of the below average performance, basic quality of life features are completely missing, like an FOV slider, brightness settings, turning off mouse acceleration, and of all things maps are also missing in game. It's hard to believe they spent something like 7 years making this when simple things that people would obviously want remain missing. Some of these things were missing from Fallout 4 as well, so maybe this is just the hill they die on, I don't know. All this is to say that I hadn't even really started playing the game before I was slammed with a bunch of stuff I didn't like.
Once I did start to dive into the game itself, it just got worse. I went into Starfield expecting another Bethesda game, but even then it did not prepare me for just how much this is just another Bethesda game. People still lock themselves dead center in front of you and stare lasers through your eye balls, removing any chance of ever being immersed in a conversation. You're still cracking open a door and loading into almost every building you find. You're still thrust into an open world where 'your choices matter', and yet the biggest choice you could make, namely how your character fits into the main story, is already made for you. No matter what you do you still have to be a passionate explorer. You can dress it up sometimes and say you're in it for the credits, but it falls apart so quickly. This is the most Bethesda Bethesda game that they've made and it's very much a follow up to the design philosphy that they adopted for Fallout 4. In Fallout 4, there was a big focus on combat design improvements (especially gunplay and upgrades) and making more things explorable, like all the buildings in Diamond City you could wander into that would've just been boarded up and empty in Fallout 3, for instance. Starfield takes that and multiplies it tenfold and it's no lie to say that it is easily the biggest in scope rpg that they've made. It's so big however that it feels more like an mmorpg than something like Skyrim or the Witcher 3 at this point. What you actually end up doing in Starfield is incredibly simple and repetitive a lot of the time. There are so many missions that simply require you going to talk to someone, or deliver something, or pick something up, or go shoot up a base. On top of that, the actual space exploration that connects all of these missions together is incredibly lackluster. When you're not just warping directly to the planet or system you need to go to through a menu, you have to load in and out of several cutscenes and loading screens just to get into orbit. It makes it incredibly cumbersome and immersion breaking to engage in the space travel mechanic which is hilarious considering this is a game about exploring space. There's nothing wrong with any of these things if they lead to an interesting combat scenario, or a crazy character interaction, or a cool planet or something but they almost never do. This isn't just the side quests I'm talking about either, although this does constitute most of the content of the side quests I did. This is stuff I was doing in the main story and the faction quests too. The factions and the main story are definitely the best stuff you do in the game, but goddamn dude there are so many fetch quests. There are so many caves or abandoned outposts that I did multiple times and if they're weren't literally the exact same building they were so close that it didn't matter. For ever time I thought "Hey that was a pretty good quest" there were five times I thought the opposite. Almost every time the game presented me with an interesting scenario or setting, it failed to make the stuff I actually do there fun or interesting. A couple examples: I was tasked with infiltrating rival corporations, or planting/gathering evidence as part of the Ryujin Industries faction quests. I'm being told to be discreet as I'm not supposed to be there, so don't be seen. Why then does it not matter when I run in to the backroom of the rival company and do what I want? When I hack a computer that someone is currently using and they don't seem to care? When I pickpocket a worker in front of another worker, but because the man I pickpocketed didn't notice me, no one cares? Another example: you are blackmailed into helping the government take down space pirates. At no point can I tell the pirates that I am undercover, all I can do is choose each mission i do to be more or less lethal and who I give the info that I find. Similarly, the ending of the game really only wants you to end the game one way. Another example: I'm told to board a luxury interstellar cruise vessel as the captains guest. The captain is working for the pirates I'm working with, we're trying to extract info from one of the guests. At one point, I find a note in a room that he's having an affair. I talk to him, assuming I can blackmail him with the info. Nope, no option. Turns out the game wanted me to use that info to talk to the woman he was having an affair with so should could tell me about a whole other more complicated plot I could use against him. I wasn't even allowed to try to present the info I found, the game wanted me to solve the problem in only that one way. On that same cruise, I need to access someones personal vault that only they have a keycard for. You literally walk up to them and ask them for the keycard. No subtlety, no other options. Even she responds with bewilderment. It's bizarre as hell and I assume they wanted it to be a little tongue and cheek bit of selfawareness on the games part. My point is, the game is interested in the choices you make, but only on a small scale. Anything that actually matters or could actually throw a wrench into things is not provided to the player. Bethesda games have had this problem in the past and it's just as present here as well.Why did I keep playing then, if I clearly had so much of a problem with the game? By the time I was ready to write off the game, I was far enough into the main story and comfortable enough with the gameplay loop that it was really easy to play Starfield, especially when I don't have anything else occupying my time. Like I said before, for better or for worse this is a Bethesda game and there's a certain familiar comfort to that, even if I think to myself every time I close the game it might the last time I play it.
Especially coming off of Baldurs Gate 3, a game where I fell in love with its cast of characters and was impressed by the depth of the options I was given as the player to influence my companions, the world, and the character I was able to roleplay, Starfield felt incredibly lacking in narrative depth. Like I mentioned above, it's hard to connect with anyone when they're staring you robotically in the face and considering this is the exact same level of depth you got from companions from their games 10 years ago, anyone familiar with Bethesda game companions will know the shallowness they often possess. I do think there's more ambient dialogue that they've written then past games, at least from what I remember. They'll make comments during conversations with other NPCs, or when you enter an area for the first time. They'll tell stories occasionally on your ship. But then you hear the same story for the fifth time. Or the same comment for the fifth time. And suddenly any appreciation you might have for that addition is gone. You as the player are similarly limited in dialogue options, often being presented with only the option to either help someone out of the goodness of your heart and hopefully either get paid later, or hope the game lets you ask for credits after you agree, or you can refuse. There's definitely times where you can joke around, or roleplay as a man who's only in it for the money, (which my Han Solo/Boba Fett dude definitely was) but it's so incosistent in providing these options that you could never commit to being a sarcastic dick, or a bounty hunter/smuggler with a soft spot. There are many times where you just have to choose the "I'll help you out for no reason other than I'm a good dude" option, even if you're only choosing it because you hope to get paid later, or you're trying to get to a piece of content/faction quest that you've heard is good. For a role playing game, this is a terrible thing. I found it impossible to roleplay as my Boba Solo style character and ended up not engaging with basically any faction for most of the game because you had to be doing it from a morally good, self righteous standpoint to get your foot in the door with most of them. There's only really one faction that could be considered a 'gray area' from what I found, and there's one that's comically evil, but the rest are all good dudes, including the main quest which forces you to be that excited explorer.
The focus in Starfield clearly is not about creating a number of unique, interesting quests that are deep and detailed. The focus is about having the most stuff, regardless of quality. This applies not only to the social and role playing mechanics I talked about above, but also to every other bit of content in the game. There are five upgrade tables. There's a whole outpost and mining system. There's a huge, detailed shipbuilding system. There's a thousand planets you can explore. There's so much goddamn stuff in this game and it's incredibly overwhelming, especially when you get into a city and there's eight different shops, multiple levels, guards and npcs shouting ambient quests into your ear as you run by, and everyone else you talk to casually hinting they have big and small problems it sure would be nice if you helped them with. The good news is, you don't really have to engage with any system you don't want to. I only engaged with the outpost, upgrade, mining, shipbuilding, and exploration systems as much as the game forced me to for certain quests. It begs the question though: if all these systems are easily ignored, why the hell are they here? To me, as much as I'm guessing they made them nonessential so nobody was forced to do something they didn't want to do, it makes everything feel unimportant. And that is constantly reinforced in the exploration system especially. There are so many abandoned outposts, caves, research facilities, etc and even when I was avoiding doing any of them that were out of my way, I still managed to do way too many of the same thing. That's why this game feels like an mmo to me.
For some that's exactly what they want and I don't hold that against them. I totally get why this game is very popular with a large crowd of people, maybe even the majority of people. For me however, I wanted more. As much as I tempered my expectations about what Starfield might be, I hoped this would be what Skyrim was for so many other developers of openworld rpgs. Since Skyrim came out we've seen that formula used and abused and more than a fair share of bad knockoffs have come out. We've also seen games that have honed and sharpened that genre to perfection, that redefined that genre and proved that there was more to be plummed from the depths of the bottomless hole that is open world rpgs. But Starfield isn't that. It's just another one in a long line of nonoffensive openworld games. It's not bad, but it's not great. It's fine.
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8/10
As far as Final Fantasy rhythm games go, this is it. It's got the biggest collection of music, even including songs from other popular jrpgs. For the most part, everything you wanna hear is in this game. I wish the games progression was a bit different; I'd prefer a list of all tracks as opposed to having to unlock each game one at a time and play through a chunk of its tracks, but I get why its like that. Didn't stop me from havin' a great time with Theatrhythm, thats for sure.
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9/10
After all these years, I finally played Cyberpunk 2077. It feels crazy to say that its finally worth playing after three years of being out, but there's some truth to it. The 2.0 update that released alongside Phantom Liberty fixed and redesigned a bunch of shit, not to mention added a whole new expansion. And then a couple months later, 2.1 comes out and adds even more shit. It was absolutely playable before this, but this is now definitely its best version and it shows.
The performance issues that plagued the game when it came out are gone. It still has glitches, don't get me wrong, but nothing game breaking. Mostly just cars getting stuck, people floating in the road, someone holding a gun in a cutscene when they shouldn't be. Almost all goofy, benign stuff. And now that the game runs well, holy fuck. Night City is fuckin' gorgeous. I almost always abuse fast travel and skip dialogue in games, but man, I was driving everywhere and listening to everyone (unless it was a particularly far away location). The average joe on the street doesn't look great, but the characters who matter look incredible. They emote during conversations and move around their environment and it really makes the conversations you have with them feel more real.
The fact that the game is pretty no holds barred with its character writing adds to that realism too. People don't get off easy in Night City. Everyone gets fucked up to some extent. There are real consequences, and shit often does not work out. All of this stuff, the driving around, getting messages from people, hangin out, going on missions, fucking shit up, talkin it through after, really makes the cast and the world feel so vibrant and real. I genuinely missed some characters after their story arcs ended, and any time I got a message from someone I hadn't heard from in a while was always exciting. Besides Baldurs Gate 3, I hadn't felt that way about a cast of characters in a long while.
This is a video game at the end of the day though, and if it felt like shit to play, that'd be a pretty big caveat to enjoying the writing but it plays fucking great instead. I was looking for anything else to do after beating the game and doing all the sidequests, that's how much I enjoyed playing it. I've talked to several friends who have also played/beaten the game now and we all played different ways and we all loved the gameplay. It's kind of amazing how they managed to do that. The AI isn't particularly smart or anything, and it's not like the level design is amazing. They just give the tools to create a customizable build in whatever style you like and then allow you to become so strong it feels like you're breaking the game. It's incredibly fun and incredibly empowering.
I'm just sad it's over. This has been a great year for video games (even though this technically didn't come out this year, but hey Phantom Liberty did so whatever). If you'd have asked me before, I would've been way more excited for a new Witcher game, but after playing Cyberpunk, I'd way rather have another game like this, to be honest.
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8/10
Played through all three Hitman games this year, specifically the newest three that are now part of the World of Assassination package. The fact that they're so much fun to play, even though I'm so bad at stealth games, really is a testament to how well designed they are. It's the perfect amount of sandbox goofiness, mixed with the perfect amount of stealth action. The variety of ways you can navigate and complete and given mission are amazing, and if you take the time to really familiarize yourself with a level and its options, it can feel incredibly empowering. The fact that they keep supporting it with alternate modes, stories, and dlc makes me like it even more.
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8/10
I never played the original Separate Ways, so I really had to idea what to expect when I booted it up except that I'd be playing as Ada.
Separate Ways felt like a hypercompressed, speedrun version of RE4R, in a good way. You bounce around the main three areas of the game and follow a similar progression of equipment unlock and upgradability which ended up taking me about 5 hours to beat. I ended up having a great time revisiting RE4R and figuring out what Ada did the whole team Leon was doin' his things. There's even a few moments you get an alternate perspective of events from the main campaign which was p cool.
I really loved the main campaign so this kind of bite sized return was a perfect new experience for me that just reminded me how much I want more Resident Evil. I hope they completely reboot RE5 next, or just try something completely different.
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I don't even know what to rate this game. I waited too long after we played it and it's a bit of a blur, but what I can say with confidence is that I did not like it very much.
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9/10
This came out of nowhere, and it was free, AND it was good? Yeah I really got nothing bad to say about this. Three fun puzzles that make you feel like an idiot until you figure them out, then you feel like a genius. Best thing I can say is that I was sad it ended so quickly.
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10/10
Even in this early access state. what you get with Lethal Company is still incredible. Lots of games have flirted with the idea of proximity chat, but none have committed so hard to it and I'd go as far as to say that it's crucial to fully enjoying what Lethal Company has to offer. Hearing your friend scream in the distance, calling out their name only to hear silence, the tension and hilarity that comes from knowing your friends and watching you freak out, or alternatively, being one of those spectators watching your buddy lose his mind. It's rare that being a spectator in a game can be almost or as much fun as playing the game itself, but that's what Lethal Company does. The actual tasks you do in the game are incredibly mundane, what's great about the gameplay is all the opportunities it provides for dumb, scary shit to happen. I don't even like horror games, but I can't stop playing Lethal Company. Probably another one of my favorite games ever, which makes two this year, counting Baldurs Gate 3.
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Here's the thing about Overwatch 2. Its legacy is a fucking mess. They dropped the single player mode they used to justify a sequel. They took out 2cp and replaced it with a far inferior game mode. They removed the second tank. They took out stuff like medals and on fire. And though I played for a bit when it launched in 2022, I fell off and wasn't particularly eager to get back to it. Sometime in late 2023 though...it sucked me back in. Most of the things I listed above haven't changed. They added back on fire, at least. The thing that got me back in was just avoiding all the modes I don't like. Fuck Push, fuck whatever the newest one is called. Push and the new mode feel like such wastes of time. You spend so much time walking around and the way they designed the maps means you're constantly in a position where you're gonna get flanked, or you're gonna have low ground. In general, these modes just take forever. So I just avoid them and play the classic modes. It almost feels like the og when you do that. The new heroes are generally pretty fun too, so I can't hate that. I do still hate that it's tied to battle pass progression, unless you pay.
I still have a lot of problems with Overwatch 2. It is a shambling husk of what it used to be. HOWEVER. Even that shambling husk is still a pretty fun game.
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